seminar on recycling in 1975 in Chicago, and they’d been together ever since. Still clinging to the free-lovin’, consequence-free Age of Aquarius, the closest thing they’d come to a wedding was their naming ceremony, in which Mom redubbed my father Ash Wenstein. Years later, I was not the only person who found it appropriate that my father had the temerity to name my mother Saffron, a spice that sticks to your skin and clings there for days.
Ash and Saffron had some very definite theories on how to raise a daughter. Those standards didn’t include little things such as religion, television, junk food, Western medicine, or pets. (The pet thing wasn’t an animal-rights issue. Dad was just allergic.)
There were literally no walls in my childhood home, a barely refurbished old barn that served as the central building of my parents’ very own self-sufficient, ecologically responsible commune for forward-thinking, government-hating vegans. Dad dubbed it Sunrises but eventually changed the name because people kept dropping their drugged-out teenagers at the front gate. They seemed to think it was a rehab.
People drifted in and out of the community constantly. And while I loved the laughter, the music, the energy that they brought to my home, I learned not to make friends. Kids would be gone in a few months’ time, their parents unable to make the transition into what my parents called “living responsibly.” Even those who fit in rarely stuck around longer than a few months, their restless natures keeping them on the road.
Still, my days were filled with adventure and fun, whether it was my dad’s sudden decision to spray-paint the family VW van an Easter-egg purple or my mom toting me along to a nuclear-energy protest dressed as a radioactive Statue of Liberty. Every day brought something new, something exciting. And I adored my parents—their love, their generosity, and their attention to me. I loved being the center of their world.
But what’s fun for a toddler can prove tiresome to a growing adolescent. I was home-schooled until age thirteen, when I realized that if I didn’t get into public school, I would never get into college. My mother was my teacher, keeping complex and detailed lesson plans on hand for when the county education officials inevitably showed up for their surprise inspections. And while her intentions were always good, her lessons rarely went past the planning stage. She’d decide that some cause needed her attention, and suddenly my understanding fractions or knowing the state capitals didn’t seem so important anymore. Most of the time, she’d leave me alone to do “independent study.” If my father hadn’t been a CPA in his pre-Ash life, I probably wouldn’t be able to balance my checkbook to this day.
When I rode my bike to the Bowdry County Public Schools office and asked to enroll, I had no proof of my existence beyond my birth certificate and an essay entitled “Why I Need to Be Enrolled in Public School—Right Now.”
Fortunately, the superintendent was walking by as I tried to explain my plight to his secretary. After he established that I wasn’t being neglected or abused, he told me that every child had the right to attend public school. He even offered to go to my parents’ house and explain my wishes to them. But I was so afraid of the idea of him seeing our strange, colorful little world, that he would find me a lost cause—or, worse yet, that he would drink my father’s “sun tea”—that I declined.
That afternoon marked the first argument I’d had with my parents—well, with my mother. My father seemed to think that if my parents were going to encourage me to make my own choices, that should include supporting me when those choices included public school. My mother warned of dire consequences, peer pressure, the influence of uncaring and underqualified teachers, a revisionist curriculum that would only prepare me for life as a drone, and, worse yet, refined sugars in the cafeteria food. But she eventually signed the enrollment papers, and I was the newest student in Leland High School’s ninth grade.
My mother wept as I dressed for my first day of classes, insisting on packing my lunch with honey-oat cookies, a peace offering. I dropped them into the garbage in the cafeteria and bought my first school lunch with birthday money from my loving, capitalist grandparents.
When I look back, I realize that was the breaking point. I got to school and realized exactly how different I was from other kids my age, how unprepared I was for the outside world. And I was pissed. Every act of rebellion, whether it was wearing leather shoes or voting conservative in a mock election, made me feel more normal. I flourished in high school. I became just like everybody else. I made good grades. I had a best friend, Kara Reynolds, who was happy to school me in the customs and rituals of “regular people.”
I even got a job as a car hop at the Tast-E-Grill Drive-In after school. That afternoon, I ate (and promptly threw up) my first bacon cheeseburger. But Bernie Harned, the owner, helped me slowly build my processed-foods and fats tolerance up to Frito Pie as I worked my way from car hop to manning the grill. I used my hard-earned wages to buy new clothes, CDs, makeup, junk food—forbidden little treasures that I kept in an old steamer trunk at the foot of my bed.
My enrolling at the University of Mississippi seemed to fry something in my mother’s brain. Well, more so than her concert experiences from 1966 to 1972. Her charming kookiness helped her get a security pass into my dorm and, later, my off-campus apartment building, so that she could, in her words, visit anytime. Mom used this access to “help” me sort through the things I didn’t need anymore, such as lunch meat (the fact that I was eating animal flesh was bad enough, but think of the nitrates!), nonorganic produce (poisons posing as nourishment), chemical cleaning products (baking soda and diluted vinegar work so much better). When she tossed out a full bulk-sized box of Hostess Sno Balls, I took to keeping my junk food in a locking plastic tub. And then I came home to find that she’d taken the tub to a recycling center.
Mom really thought she was doing what was best for me . . . in her own twisted, self-centered way. After all, how could I tell my own mother she wasn’t welcome in my home? How could I be mad at her for throwing away a bunch of junk that was bad for me anyway? She was only thinking of my health. And hadn’t she replaced it with nine-grain bread, tofu dogs, carob cookies—all the things I’d loved when I was a kid? Arguing with her was like trying to grab a greased eel; once I thought I had a grip, she’d squirm away and switch tactics.
So I studied hard and dreamed of using my marketing degree to get a job in Illinois, New York, California—as far away from Mississippi as I could get. I dreamed of solitude, of privacy, of owning a home that my parents couldn’t just barge into by virtue of the spare key they’d wheedled out of my maintenance man.
My dad embraced pacifism. As in, he didn’t want to get between my mother and me when we were fighting. And then, about a month before graduation, Mom and I were arguing over whether she and my dad would be coming to the ceremony. Mom wanted to attend a conference that weekend on pharmacological waste’s impact on the water supply. When I objected, she said I shouldn’t be participating in such an overblown, elitist, meaningless ceremony in the first place. I said it was my overblown, elitist, meaningless ceremony, and it wouldn’t kill her to put her multitude of principles aside for a morning and make me happy for a change.
“This is just so damned typical!” I yelled. “You try to take over every part of my life. You practically follow me around collecting my toenail clippings for posterity, but when something is really important, important to me, you couldn’t care less. Because I didn’t go to an environmentally responsible school. I didn’t study the right subjects. You think my teachers brainwashed me. You know, most people would be thrilled that their daughter was graduating from college with good grades. When are the two of you going to act like normal parents?”
And that’s when Dad sort of keeled over and had a massive heart attack.
Apparently, there’s only so much that oat bran can do for your cardiac system.
With my mother in full-on histrionic mode, I had to step in to take care of the decisions at the hospital and talk to the doctors. I moved back to the commune to help out while my dad recovered. And when he was back on his feet, I found a job at a little company outside Jackson that sold advertising inserts for newspapers. The hour- long drive back and forth to check in on them was exhausting, but it was worth it to be able to go to my own little house at the end of the day.
Mom soon returned to her old ways. Morning, noon, and night, my parents showed up at my doorstep with huge dishes of marinated tofu, herbal teas, some THC-soaked mementos from my childhood. This only grew worse after my engagement to Tim, an insurance adjuster whose offices were next door to mine. My mother often commented that our meeting at a Starbucks every morning for lattes was proof that the relationship was doomed to fail. Nothing associated with the Evil Caffeinated Empire could be good in her eyes.
Tim Galloway was everything my parents loathed. Conservative, Christian, the product of a two-parent, two- income household. He paid his taxes cheerfully. He had a membership with the Steak of the Month Club. Even if he was the opposite of my usual type, I felt safe with him. He was level-headed, funny, and kind. He had a five-year plan, which, after an appropriate number of very conventional dinner-and-a-movie dates, included me. If there was no fiery passion or leg-bowing sexual escapades, that was fine. I knew what to expect.
